


Sweat, Tears, or the Sea

by zjofierose



Category: Star Trek RPF
Genre: Anxiety, Bathing/Washing, Beer, California, Desert, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, M/M, Mountains, References to Depression, Running Away, Sad Chris, Scenery Porn, Slow Burn, TOO MANY COMMAS, Wordplay as foreplay, but really extremely oblique and in passing, likewise very brief mention of a panic attack, very very oblique and brief suicidal ideation, zach rides in on a white horse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-01
Updated: 2018-03-01
Packaged: 2019-03-25 12:36:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13834416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zjofierose/pseuds/zjofierose
Summary: The cure for anything is salt water.





	Sweat, Tears, or the Sea

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to the_deep_magic for the beta read and solidarity writing, and to both her and baron_von_chop for the continual encouragement. <3
> 
> Author’s Note the First: the locations are based on real places in California that I love, but I’m drastically misrepresenting the distances between them, because reasons. Sorry.
> 
> Author's Note Part Two: throwing someone in the ocean is probably not actually a good cure for a panic attack. 
> 
> For sarahphym, if she wants it.

He’s between projects, and maybe that’s what starts it, or at least what makes room for it in the quotidian rituals of his life. He’s never done well with downtime; he gets restless, or broody, and if he doesn’t have something good to focus on, he can spiral downward faster than he’s comfortable with. He’s not like Zach, with a million projects always going at a low boil; he likes to work on things sequentially, when possible, but he does like them fairly close together: not too much time in between, no more than a couple weeks to catch up with friends, maybe have a few beers some place sunny, and then back to reading scripts and getting a filming schedule or doing a publicity tour.

This time, it’s a blank. There are a few things his agent’s looking at, but nothing’s grabbing them, and so he sits alone in his house too many days, reading books he loved in college and sleeping till stupid hours of the afternoon and generally driving himself out of his mind. He hits three days between showers and decides that’s enough, shoving himself under the faucet before throwing some clothes and books in a duffel and heading out the door. He texts his agent, his mom, and Zach, tells them he’s going off-grid for a bit and not to worry, and slides his car into LA afternoon traffic without a backward look.

He drives till the light gives out, the sun sinking behind the dusty hills that border the 101 and turning the sky uncountable shades of peach and orange, lavender and grey. He pulls over to watch, getting out of his car and leaning against it, letting the heat of the metal sink into his body and release the tension he’s held in his muscles for weeks, months, a year. The sun disappears and the stars come out, a freshly waning moon rising not much later to the southeast as the last faint vestiges of color leach into night.

The car is still warm when he gets back in, and he puts the brights on. He’s always lived in cities, but he’s driven up and down enough to know the frequency of critter crossings on a highway at night. The dark out here is unrelenting, heavy, closing in around the beams of light that strike out from the front of the car. Twisted oak trees loom out around curves, deer dive from the sound of his engine. Twice he hits fog banks, dense, low-hanging, otherworldly passages where all he can see is the thirty feet of road in front of him and he slows to a crawl, flinching when another car approaches and scatters light around so he can’t see.

He finds a tiny town, nearly misses the sign altogether but makes the hard right off the highway and drives the two further miles to find the two gas stations, the looming Catholic church, and the ten room motel, neon sign shining  _ Va an y _ into the night.

_ Perfect _ , he thinks, as he peels into the gravel that passes for a parking lot.

\--

There’s no cell reception, but that’s a good thing; it cuts back on the brooding if he can’t obsess over the news or actively avoid emails. He’s brought his guitar and he bought a pack of smokes at the gas station, so he decides to live into the caricature and takes up sitting out front of his room in a decrepit chair playing the guitar, a cigarette shoved into the curl of his lip. The adults stare at him as they walk past, this stranger who seems to have nothing better to do than sit around and waste time, but some of the kids come play games near him, and make requests. He doesn’t know half the songs they want, but he manages his way through some classic MJ and a couple Taylor Swift tunes, then switches to teaching them about the joys of Zeppelin and The National. Eventually one teenager produces his own instrument, and tries to teach him some norteño; it doesn’t go well, musically, but everyone enjoys the hilarity. He makes up for for his utter failure by buying enough pizza to share. 

He thinks about going to church on the first Sunday that he’s there; he likes church well enough, even though he’s not anything like a regular attendee. But the town’s got about 700 people, and he’ll stand out like a sore thumb. He already does, there’s no avoiding it, but it’s one thing to hang around a motel for a few weeks like a weirdo; motels expect weirdos, at least a few of them. It’s another thing altogether to show up at the church like he might settle in here. He goes for a hike instead, getting thoroughly turned around up in the hills and only figuring out where he is when he ends up nearly falling into the Salinas River as it feeds out into the valley from the confluence of the mountains.

By the time he gets back to the motel he’s the good kind of exhausted, loose in his muscles and stiff in his back. He strips and gets in the shower, rubbing out a perfunctory orgasm under the lukewarm water before he falls into bed feeling better than he has in months. 

It starts a new routine, and it’s good, he thinks: wake up, go to the one cafe in town and drink some coffee while he reads a book that lives on the “free” shelf. Pick up a sandwich and a couple bottles of water at the market. Head out of town in a different direction than he’s gone before. Wander until he’s worn out. Return. He starts doing calisthenics, too, push-ups in the morning when he wakes, sit-ups in the evening before he showers. He’s kind of eating like shit, but he’s active enough it doesn’t seem to be a problem, his body stretching out lean with the miles he’s covering every day. He fills a moleskin with notes, nonsense, drawings of mountains and leaves, buys a new notebook at the market. It’s not a moleskin, nothing like it, but it’s good enough, it takes pen and pencil and holds his babbling as well as anything else.

It’s gets really hot a couple weeks into his stay, don’t-wander-around-during-midday-you-might-die kind of hot, and the boredom sets in again as he lies on his hotel room bed flicking through basic cable, the swamp cooler struggling to keep up with the hundred-teens temperatures outside his four walls. He gives up around two pm and walks to the gas station to buy some beer and another pack of smokes, and by the time he gets back to the hotel he’s sweated through his undershirt, so he strips it off, dumping it in a pile with his jeans by the side of the bed and flopping on the bed in his underwear. The condensation on the brown glass bottle is cold when it drips onto his chest, and the shock of the chill is a little bit like heaven. 

He dozes off somewhere after beer number three, and is startled awake by a knock on the door. The sound makes him freeze, every muscle tight, but the sudden jerk of his waking shakes loose an empty bottle near the head of the bed. It falls with a precipitous rattling thunk as it rolls off the bed onto the thinly carpeted floor, hitting the nightstand on the way down.

The knocking comes again, and Chris exhales, knowing the sound has given him away. 

“Coming,” he shouts, fumbling around for his dirty undershirt and a pair of sleep pants, yanking the shirt into place with one hand as he pulls the drawstring of his pants tight with the other. “Hold your horses,” he grouses as the knocking comes again. He gets his pants tied and reaches for the door, pulling it open before he can lose his nerve. “I’m right fucking…”

“ _ Here _ you are,” Zach says, as obscenely unrumpled as ever in spite of the heat in his tank-top and dumb cut-off shorts, a straw hat shoved back from his forehead. “Took me three days, you idiot. What do you think you’re doing out here in the literal middle of nowhere?”

“How did you find me?” Chris asks, holding the door open so Zach can stalk past him into the room, rubbing a hand over his face. There’s no getting rid of Zach when he’s decided to be around; Chris wasn’t really done being alone yet, but it’s okay. 

“Jim Grayson?” Zach flops onto the bed and rolls his eyes. “I’ll admit the Grayson was a nice touch; I spent a day looking for Tiberiuses, and you got further north than I figured, but still.” 

Chris just shrugs, and Zach’s eyes narrow. 

“Why’d you run, anyway?” Zach’s voice is gentler, pointed but less accusing. “Too cooped up?” He holds out one long arm and Chris goes over, dropping onto the bed next to him. It’s still too hot in the room to touch, but lying on the bed together staring up at the water-stained ceiling is nice. 

He shrugs again. “You know how I get sometimes.” Zach does; they’ve talked about it, and Zach’s seen it before, twice, though it’s been a while. They were closer then; it’d only taken Zach a day to hunt him down after he’d decided Chris had been wallowing long enough.

Zach hmms and switches the TV off, rolling onto his side. “I do,” he says, and reaches out to rub his knuckles in the top of Chris’ hair. “Mind if I stay over?”

“No,” Chris shakes his head and readjusts himself on the mattress. The adrenaline crash from the surprise of someone knocking is combining with the beers from earlier to make him feel vaguely queasy, so he closes his eyes and breathes slowly. He can feel Zach watching him, but he lies silently, concentrating on the feeling of his lungs expanding and collapsing, and eventually, he falls asleep.

\--

He wakes from a nightmare well after the sun has set, gasping as he sits up. Zach is asleep next to him, face down and drooling slightly into the pillow, ridiculous hat askew on his dark head. He’s still just as handsome as he was when they met ten years ago, but he’s lost the preternatural edge to his beauty, time and work making faint lines in his skin, a stray thread of grey through the black of his hair. It makes no difference; Chris could still trace the shape of his face blindfolded.

He slips off the bed, the shift of the mattress making Zach mumble faintly, and slides silently into his jeans and t-shirt. He remembers to grab the room key and his wallet as he soundlessly opens the door, closing it carefully behind him. Zach gets a little over-protective sometimes, but hopefully he can get back before Zach wakes up.

It’s beautiful out now, the last vestiges of color at the western horizon fading into inky night, the temperature down in the upper 70s with a nice valley breeze. He walks out to the edge of town first, down to the river to listen to it trickle past as it carries the sound of frogs to the south. His body feels taut and stiff from his inactivity, so he stretches briefly before jogging back to the other side of town to the one pizza joint. He’d expected it to be busy, full of teenagers and couples on dates, families with their kids, but it’s not, and he does the math to realize that it’s Tuesday. It shouldn’t bother him that he doesn’t remember what day it is, but it does - it feels like a thing normal people should know, would know, and if he were just a regular guy with a regular job and a real life, he thinks he would know it. Tuesday, a workday, a school night: maybe his wife would have to work late, so he’d have to take the kids to soccer practice and read a book in between cheering for goals, or maybe his boyfriend would get stuck in traffic, so he’d make dinner alone with a glass of wine and the radio, careful to keep things warm until he heard the sound of the door.

He orders a meat-lovers special and a salad, taking a seat on the bench outside and flipping half-heartedly through yesterday’s paper. Fifteen minutes later his order’s up and he claims it, slipping a five into the tip jar and walking back to the motel. When he gets there, Zach’s up, sitting in the chair in front of the room and smoking, his bare feet up on the railing and hat still haphazardly shoved on his head. Chris walks inside without a word, settling on the bed and clicking the TV on before beginning to eat. Zach joins him shortly, smelling of smoke and sweat, and they eat in silence, then watch godawful TV and make fun of the infomercials until they both fall asleep.

\--

“You’ve got two days,” Zach says in the morning when Chris blinks awake around six to a room filled with light and a stubble-faced man doing yoga in his underpants at the end of the bed. Chris pulls a hand over his face and nods, rolling off the bed and heading for the bathroom. He feels hungover and resents the impending end of his escape, as necessary as he knows it to be. 

He lets the tears come while he’s in the shower, washing in with the hot water as it runs over his face, the gusty sobs coming over him in a wave and passing with the soap down the drain. 

When he steps out of the shower, he feels hollow but calm. He dresses while Zach takes his turn at the bathroom, and grabs his supplies- notebook, sunscreen, water. Zach is faster this morning with his daily ablutions than Chris has seen in a while, and turns up at the cafe down the street before Chris has finished his coffee. He doesn’t say a word about Chris ditching him, just orders some eggs and toast, stealing a drink from Chris’ cup and making a face as he waits for the waitress to bring his own. They eat in silence, letting the caffeine sink into their blood as the sun climbs into the sky, finishing just as it clears the mountains to the east and turns the trees from dewy-grey-green to a dusty olive. 

It’s fun at first, showing Zach around. Chris takes them past the general store, the gas station, and the small cemetery, its weathered stones washed nearly bare by a hundred years of sandy winds next to more modern polished granite markers still smooth and gleaming. The white clapboard sides of the church lead into gravel streets of squat bungalows, rose bushes and big wheels and a car up on blocks. They cross the small plank bridge that stretches over the river and head upward, gaining altitude quickly as they skirt the canyon that runs into the edge of town, making their way up the dusty track out of town and climb into the foothills, dense brush near the river giving way to sage scrub. Small striped lizards go skittering from their steps as their shadows slide over sandstone and shale, disappearing into the rocks with a rattle and a flick of their narrow tails. Zach has, Chris is pleased to note, actually packed reasonable hiking boots, and is not just baring his toes to every passing rattlesnake and thorny bush. Chris wouldn’t put it past him to wander into the desert in two dollar flip flops from the drugstore, but today is apparently not that day, thank God, because Chris didn’t think to pack a snakebite kit.

They keep climbing, the rush of the wind and the morning cacophony of birdsong echoing around them in counterpoint to the crunch of gravel under their feet and the rhythm of their breath. Zach makes them pause after they make it halfway up the side of mountain, the town a topographical diorama below them, the curling twist of the river winding down the narrow valley and watering the fields, mirrored by the artificially straight parallel of the highway following beside. They can see oil rigs in the distance, tiny anvil-headed automatons bobbing ever up and down, pulling up the liquid bones of swamps and dinosaurs. 

“Christopher,” he says eventually, perched on a rock with his legs stretched out in front of him to catch the sun, “use your words.” Zach’s tone is not demanding, but it is firm, and Chris breathes out slowly through his teeth as he thinks.

“Doldrums,” he says after a while. “Disconsolate,” he adds, because Zach’s always a fan of alliteration. 

Zach nods thoughtfully, and produces a cigarette from the pocket of his worn white  _ guyabera  _ shirt and lights it. 

“Lugubrious?” He asks, and Chris frowns, shaking his arm to chase a fly off. He’s never liked that word; it’s too ridiculous, too weighed down with its own vowels.

“No,” he says, “sullen. Morose. Melancholic.”

“Why?” Zach says without further preamble, the cigarette dangling from his fingers. He looks out of place here, rolled straw hat and greased black hair and dumb loose linen pants placing him in a Barcelona ex-burb or Old Havana. 

Chris shrugs uncomfortably. “Same reasons as always I suppose. I don’t know.”

“God, you’re predictable.” Zach rolls his eyes. He doesn’t mean it to sting, but it does, and Chris pulls his knees up to his chest, looking out again across the valley to where the river sparkles in the morning light. It’s barely past ten, but it’s already pushing 90 degrees. “I’ll tell you what it is,   
Zach continues matter of factly. “You’re so focused on your projects that the minute you’re left to your own devices, you get all up in your own head and can’t remember how to just relax and enjoy yourself. You ferment in your own little anxious milieu. You need to take a trip or something, get out and have a good time.”

“I  _ did  _ take a trip,” Chris says pointedly, “I came here.”

Zach looks over at his tone, eyebrows wrinkling. “Yeah. You drove six hours up the highway to hide out in a town so small it gets its tumbleweeds on a timeshare.”

“Ha ha.” Chris shrugs again, kicking at the sand of the trail with the tip of his shoe. “I don’t know, man. I just… yeah, when I’m working, it’s fine. I can focus on the work, I can feel like what I’m doing is worthwhile, meaningful, even if only just as a job. It pays the bills, it’ll mean I can retire someday.”

“...but when you’re not working?” Zach prompts, ashing onto the boulder, watching carefully for sparks. 

Chris sighs and rubs the palms of his hands into his eyes. He hates trying to talk about what goes on in his head. There aren’t words that don’t sound stupid, that don’t reduce the desperation he feels to something pathetic and small, trivial and overwrought.

“Dull,” he says, “disenchanted. Fucking… depressed, I guess.” He pushes off the boulder and starts walking. Zach does nothing so inelegant as hurry after him, but Chris knows he’ll catch up.

\--

“I just start to think about what my life could be,” he says after they’ve stopped in a wooded spot on the far side of the ridge to eat some sandwiches a couple hours later. “I start thinking about how I’m pushing forty, which always seemed so goddamn old, except I feel the same as I ever did, but then what the hell am I doing? What do nearly forty year old men do?”

“Work boring desk jobs and develop a beer gut, mostly,” Zach answers, busily peeling the tomato off his bread. “Is that what you want?”

“Don’t be asinine.” Chris rolls his eyes as Zach chomps into a pickle with a look of satisfaction. “It’s just, I never pictured myself like this.”

“Like what? A successful Hollywood actor?”

“No,” Chris shakes his head and picks at the crust on his turkey and cheese. “No, I figured… maybe a stagehand, or an English professor if I was feeling ambitious, or a script writer. I never thought that I’d actually…”

“Make it?” Zach eyeballs him critically. “You know, it’s a little insulting how cavalier you are about what you’ve accomplished. For some of us, this was the goal. What we do  _ is _ , in fact, the thing I spent my entire youth and young adulthood busting my balls to make happen, and I don’t need to spend a single minute running away from it, because this. is. it.” 

“Are you happy?” 

“ _ Yeah _ , I’m happy.” Zach sets the remains of his sandwich aside and runs a hand through his hair. “I get to travel all around the world meeting creative and interesting people, I get to work on material and projects that inspire me, I get paid well. I have a good place to live, I can see my family when I want, I have my pets That was always… that’s the whole package, Chris.” He glances at his arms, where the leaves of the oak trees are casting dappled shadows on his bare skin. “So, yeah, I’m happy, I am fucking  _ delighted  _ most days unless I’m stuck in traffic or on a shitty flight.” He shakes his head and turns to squint up at Chris. “Also, I don’t buy this whole ‘ _ I didn’t plan to be an actor _ ’ nonsense. You’re as competitive as the rest of us, and you’re a goddamn nerd. You love acting, and you’re good at it, and you’re rational enough to know you wouldn’t be getting the jobs you get if you weren’t.”

Chris rubs his fingers together, flexing them against each other. “Sure, I wanted to be an actor,” he answers slowly. “And sure, in the privacy of my own head, I think I’m good. But so does everyone. How many people are busily writing the Next Great American novel? How many people try out for American Idol? Our own opinions of ourselves mean next to nothing; I may have  _ wanted  _ to be an actor, but I never thought I’d actually  _ succeed _ .”

“But you did. You have.”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t seem real somehow. Like I can’t shake the feeling that I’ll wake up some morning in a house in the suburbs, some pencil pusher who auditions for community theater on weekends. And then I start thinking about what a normal guy my age would have, would be doing…”

“Like what?”

“Like…I don’t know!” Chris flings his hands wide in frustration. “Like cleaning the garage on weekends. Like going to parent-teacher conferences, or complaining about my boss. Planning a family vacation to the Grand Canyon, and finding popcorn in the couch while I’m watching a DVR’d baseball game after the kids have gone to bed.”

“Well,” Zach says after a minute, “you can come clean my garage if it’ll make you feel better.”

Chris huffs a laugh through his nose. “You don’t have a garage.”

“Perils of apartment living. Besides, you don’t even like baseball.” Zach tosses a chip and hits Chris in the shoulder, leaving a smear of nacho dust on his already dirt-covered t-shirt. “But you know there’s nothing preventing you from doing these things, right? I mean, look at Karl and Cho- they’ve got families. Zoe’s married.”

“I know,” Chris stares at his fingers. The sun is directly overhead now, and he can feel the sweat sliding down his spine. “It’s not the specifics, it’s just the whole concept of normalcy, whatever that would have looked like for me. Whatever that is, that’s out of reach, and I guess I just… can’t help but miss it.”

\--

Zach lets him alone after lunch, making idle conversations about friends and colleagues, the latest gossip on who’s doing who, and who’s doing what. He talks about his latest trip, the museums, the food, the alcohol. Chris takes it in and lets it flow through him, nodding and verbalizing affirmatively in all the right places. He knows that Zach knows he’s not paying attention, but it doesn’t matter. It’s part of their thing- Zach talks, Chris listens, and a lot of the time that’s enough.

The rest of the time… well, Chris doesn’t think about the rest of the time. 

They make it back down to the edge of town as dusk is falling, the noise of bugs humming thick in the air, but not loud enough to cover the sound of Zach’s stomach growling. They’d run out of water an hour ago, but the temperature had already started dropping, and they’d never been that far from town, so Chris hadn’t worried. Zach’s red across the nose now, his arms shades darker than when they left this morning. The farmer tan’s going to drive Zach nuts, Chris thinks with a laugh. He’s surprised Zach hadn’t spent all day wandering around shirtless just to avoid the possibility of getting unevenly brown. 

The lights glow out of the valley like a hundred small lighthouses, shining safety into the encroaching darkness as they make their way down. They stop for corndogs and ice cream at the gas station, and Zach buys popsicles for the kids playing with a kickball outside, which wins him immediate and total adoration that he soaks up shamelessly. Chris just watches, and shakes his head with a smile.

\--

He wakes before dawn the next morning and leaves silently, Zach snoring away in the bed behind him as he pulls the door closed. He perches in the chair outside to pull his shoes on, and tries not to think about how it’s the last time he’ll see this sunrise, breathe this cool predawn air, sit on the edge of this rickety wicker seat. The sky is light all over, pale blues fading to pinks, the glow on the eastern horizon increasing minute by minute, eating up the time as the earth spins ceaselessly in its orbit.

He skips the coffee and heads straight to the river, walking into the streambed until he’s wet up to his knees and starting off to the north without a look back. It’s shallow even here, not far from the headwaters, and he knows it dies off further downstream, disappearing into the agricultural land that grows the lettuce he eats in his hummus wraps and the artichokes in Zach’s chip dip. It feels futile, all this water trickling onward, ever onward, not knowing that it will be diverted into fields and furrows, sprayed with pesticides and evaporated by the beating sun. Rivers are meant to reach oceans, he thinks, it’s their one purpose, and now this one never will, this water rushing around his legs will disappear into desert air, failing in the desperate rushing quest toward an outlet.

It strikes him as unutterably sad, and he wants to sit down in the water, sink into the riverbed and let the water close overhead until he, too, is made of flowing water that dissipates into the rock.

He walks further than he has before, following the river until it enters a gorge and becomes abruptly narrow and too deep for him to follow without swimming. He wades out onto the smooth rock at the edge and watches the water sparkling in the sun, moving swift and blue through the passageway in front of him. He wants to jump in, wants to strip his clothes from his body and dive into the water naked as the day he was born, wants to swim until he can’t think thoughts anymore, wants to shed his skin and be transformed into someone, something else entirely.

_ Zach _ , he thinks,  _ Zach, waking up in the motel, drinking his coffee and making his pretentious hipster notes in the margin of his books. Zach, dark hair sticking out sideways from sleep, eyes heavy and warm, hands wide and strong _ . 

The thought carries him away from the river, even as the sibilant whisper of the current calls him. He can swim fine, but he’s alone out here, and who knows how deep the gorge is, or how swift the current at the bottom. He feels like he’s going out of his mind, but he’s not crazy yet, so he turns back to the east and begins to walk again, up and up and up.

\--

He’s never gone quite to the top of the mountain ridges before, choosing to skirt the edges and trace the waist of them, sticking to the chaparral and oak scrub instead of seeking out the windswept tops, but today he goes up until there’s nothing above him but sky. It’s as empty up here as it looks from the bottom, waist-high sagebrush and some long grass. The sun is beating down, but it feels good, warming him from the outside in. He closes his eyes and lets the wind make him feel like he’s falling, stretching his arms out and listening to the distant sound of a train as it rumbles along the rails below him. 

A vulture circles overhead, the shadow of it opening his eyes again, and he looks up at it and shakes a fist, making it glide off almost apologetically.  _ Sorry _ , it seems to say, _ just checking, you know how it is. _

He watches it sail off into the distance, the sun shining on its glossy black wings, then lays down in the dirt. Everything is completely still around him, but he can feel the planet spinning beneath his body.  _ 900 miles an hour _ , he thinks nonsensically, and holds his breath as he waits to fly off into space. 

It doesn’t happen. Instead, the sun continues to shine down, the breeze continues to blow. A large black beetle crawls out from under a bush and walks business-like across his arm. There is no larger meaning to his life up here; he is simply an obstacle to be gotten over. He covers his face with his hands and screams into them, putting all the frustration and franticness he feels inside himself into the expulsion of air past his vocal cords, then takes his hands away and does it again.

He imagines the rays of the sun burning the apathy, the itchiness, out of him, some uber-natur radiation therapy wherein taking oneself to a mountain top and spreading oneself out constitutes a willingness to be burned free, to be fired in the solar kiln, to come out hardened and refined. He rolls over and shouts with abandon into the gopher hole that lies just to the left of his head. He envisions all the boredom, all the loneliness, all the ridiculous existential angst that he can never bring himself to put into words, all of it exiting his body and going deep into the heart of the mountain as the sun cooks him from behind.

_ There is no greater meaning in this _ , he thinks,  _ it is simply an obstacle to be got over _ , and rolls onto his back again, closing his eyes and turning his palms to the sky. 

\--

“Come here,” Zach says when Chris opens the door hours after dark, his eyes red from tears and skin tender from sun, “come on, baby, let’s get you taken care of.”

Chris just nods mutely, and goes where Zach leads him, letting the weight of Zach’s body guide him to the bathroom and peel the sweat-sticky shirt from his shoulders, dropping it on the floor next to to the tub. Zach turns the water on, takes a look at the shade of pink on Chris’ forearms, and grabs a bottle from the sink and dumps some oil into the pooling water. Chris wants to laugh, because only Zach would bring bath oil to some cheap-ass side-of-the-highway motel, but his teeth have begun chattering instead, so it comes out more as a clattering sigh. 

“Come on,” Zach says, and this is nothing like the first time Zach undressed him, dizzy with drink and suave in the darkness, but the touch of his fingers is the same, firm and steady as the thousand-year hills around them. He pulls Chris’ shorts and briefs to the floor and taps at the back of Chris’ thighs until he steps carefully into the tub. 

The water is fragrant and almost too hot, and the tub is too short for him to stretch out his legs, but Chris slides into it with relief, knobby knees poking up out of the water as he lets himself slip down until he’s submerged up to his neck.

“Here,” Zach says, and Chris cracks open an eye to see that Zach is handing him a bottle of water. “Drink. Where the fuck have you been all day, John Muir? Wrestling bears in the wilderness? Pinning an angel and forcing him to give you a new name?”

Chris takes the bottle and opens it, opening his mouth and letting the icy water rush down over his tongue, cold enough that he can feel it tracing down his throat as he swallows. He lets his eyes close again, and recaps the bottle, handing it blindly out of the tub until he feels Zach grasp it. 

“Saying goodbye,” Chris answers, and gets his hands back under the water so that his body can be uniformly warm again. 

“Yeah, ok.” Zach’s hands are on him again, this time with the roughness of a cloth that he scrubs up and down and over Chris’ neck and shoulders, down across his arms, the fingers of Zach’s other hand interlacing with Chris’ own so that Zach can lift his arm out of the water and run the cloth over the underside and up into his armpit, a haze of suds foaming in its wake. “Want to talk about it?”

Chris thinks about it for a minute, sitting up at Zach’s gentle push so that the cloth can reach across his back. 

“No,” he says finally, sliding back under the water to his chin, eyes still closed. He thinks maybe he can’t open them now, maybe they’ve sealed themselves shut and he’ll never open them again. The world is too bright, too intrusive. Here in the dim glow behind his eyelids he feels calmer, safe. 

“Lean back,” Zach says, and Chris does, sinking with a sigh into Zach’s capable hands as they scrub through his hair, loosening the accumulation of sand, sweat, and stress. The hands disappear for a moment, then come back full of scented shampoo, Zach’s own. Chris loves it; he’ll smell like Zach for days.  “You want me to come in?”

Chris laughs before he can think about it, the sound rusty and echoing in the small tiled room. 

“No, but thanks. Pretty sure this tub doesn’t even actually fit me.”

He doesn’t have to have his eyes open to know Zach’s one-shoulder shrug. “Ok. Lean back again.” 

\--

The swamp cooler is going full blast in the room when they open the bathroom door, a rush of steam and heat billowing out before them. Chris clutches the towel more closely around him and makes his way to the foot of the bed, Zach moving quietly behind him to turn off the light and set the chain on the door. 

He tips forward, fully intent on faceplanting into the mattress, but Zach catches him as he goes, pulling the towel sharply free with one hand and easing Chris down with the other, naked and unashamed onto the freshly changed sheets. He settles Chris onto his stomach, head turned so he can breathe, arms stretched out at his sides, and Chris hears the rustle of Zach undressing, can smell the scent of his body floating through the room. Zach steps closer and runs a questioning finger down the length of Chris’ spine,  _ hmming  _ under his breath as goosebumps rise in its wake. He steps away again and Chris can hear him adjusting the temperature gauge on the air unit, which goes abruptly quiet, leaving the room still and expectant.

There’s the loud, definite sound of a cap clicking from a few feet away, and then comes the feel of oiled hands sliding up his back. Chris smiles into the darkness, wriggling on the bed until he’s fully comfortable. Zach and his fucking body oils. Not that Chris minds, not at all, he thinks as Zach’s hands dig into the tendons at the base of his skull, making him groan aloud. Zach chuckles softly, and swings a leg over so that he’s sitting in the small of Chris’ back, knees bracketing Chris’ ribcage, bare warm thighs tight around Chris’ hips, balls pressed into the initial curve of Chris’ ass. The weight of him feels good, and Chris relaxes further, breathing deeply and slowly as Zach’s hands find his own, pressing into his palms, rubbing down through his metacarpals and phalanges, separating and lengthening. Zach’s hands wander up one arm, kneading and pressing, lifting the muscle off the bone, and then down the other, and Chris feels like he’s floating, like the only thing holding him to the bed, to reality, is the warm sweet weight of Zach pressed onto his sacrum.

Zach works him over stem to stern, his wiry fingers digging every knot from Chris’ back and neck, rendering him limp and witless, able only to focus on the pull of air in and out of his lungs, the way his breath feels over his tongue and teeth, the way Zach’s skin feels alternately smooth and rough against his own. At some point he realizes he’s hard, and it’s been no secret for a while that Zach is, but it doesn’t matter. The echoes of the hundred times they’ve done this before move around them, removing any sense of urgency from their motions, letting the push and pull between them move naturally as Zach’s dexterous hands move inexorably lower until they’re kneading into Chris’ glutes and hamstrings, the pleasure of it so intense after weeks of literal mountain climbing that Chris knows his moans are obscene. 

By the time Zach finishes with his clean, bare feet and gently spreads Chris’ knees, Chris thinks he has become one with the mattress, or possibly that he has transcended human form altogether, and now resides on a higher plane where the ending between his flesh and Zach’s fingertips has blurred. Perhaps that really is the truth, he thinks muzzily as Zach’s fingers slide carefully into him, perhaps the time they’ve spent together over the last, Jesus,  _ decade  _ has fused them on an atomic level. Where his atoms used to be, now perhaps there are some of Zach’s. And maybe the shudder that shakes his body when Zach removes his fingers but before he replaces them with his cock is simply a side-effect of the confused atoms mingling, swapping protons and electrons, tying them together on a sub-atomic level.

“Quantum entanglement,” he mutters into the pillow as Zach spreads his body over Chris’, pressing him into the mattress evenly, and Zach just laughs, resting his face almost chastely in the curve of Chris’ neck. 

They lie there for a long moment, and Chris feels filled, secure and grounded in a way he hasn’t felt in months. If the earth is spinning, he thinks, and he is spinning on it, then this must be the axis point, that invisible core around which everything else in his life spins. 

When they move, it’s slowly, heat building between them, their breaths synchronized with each other and with the push and drag of their hips. It takes a moment and it takes forever, each push from Zach into his body bringing him closer and closer to the edge until Chris’ heart skips in his chest and every muscle tightens, Zach groaning softly into his ear as his arms lock around Chris’ shoulders, fingers in the muscles of Chris’ neck and toes pushing against the arches of Chris’ feet. 

Chris grabs for Zach’s hands and holds on tight. They sleep without separating on top of the sheets.

\--

They pack the car first thing and don’t even bother to stop for food until they hit Paso Robles.  _ It’s like a bandaid,  _ Zach says,  _ gotta just rip that fucker off _ , and Chris thinks he’s probably right. They eat pancakes with powdered sugar and eggs at a Black Bear Diner, and Zach charms the middle-aged waitress into adding extra fruit to his stack. 

He’s feeling good, in spite of the sugar rush and the knowledge that he’ll be back in the city by nightfall. He’s not really ready to go back, but probably he never really would be. His sister told him once that he’s never allowed to move out of civilization because he will go feral in a matter of weeks, and he thinks she’s probably right. Not a problem Zach would have, he thinks, watching with amused affection as Zach bops along with the 90’s pop from the San Luis Obispo station they’re picking up, one hand on the wheel, the other arm out the window and tapping on the top of the car in time with the music. 

They crest the coastal mountains around lunchtime, the Pacific spread out vast and grey ahead of them, the thick white smear of the marine layer visible on the skyline, small dark squares of oil rigs a regular interruption to the glassy surface of the water. 

“Look!” Zach points, “I can see Russia from here!” Chris reaches over and whacks him, and Zach laughs like a loon. 

They eat a late lunch at a roadside diner, cheeseburgers and fries and a chocolate milkshake they share like they’re coeds and it’s 1953. Chris eats the cherry, mostly so he can watch Zach’s face as he knots the stem with his tongue, and Zach spoons the whipped cream off the top in revenge to lick into his mouth one sinful taste at a time.

\--

They’re close enough to see the light pollution of LA when it finally catches up with him, that hovering swarm of panic that’s been trailing the car since they first left this morning, and he starts hyperventilating as he feels the fist in his solar plexus squeezing tight. He clutches at the door handle and closes his eyes, trying to regulate his breathing, but it’s not more than a couple minutes before he’s seeing spots, and he can hear the air whistling through his teeth. 

So can Zach, apparently, because they’re pulling over onto the side of the road, and Zach throws the car into park and slams his door and then he’s unceremoniously hauling Chris out of the car by his arms and across the scrubby edge of grass to the cliff face. There are stairs that Chris hardly notices, too focused on pulling air into his lungs to do more than clutch at Zach for balance as they go slipping and stepping down to the sand. He can feel the sand move from hot and dry to cool and damp under his bare feet and then waves are crashing around his legs and he still can’t breathe and he grabs for Zach, who grasps him firmly by the shirt-front and tosses him into the ocean.

Everything goes up and over, the water shockingly cold even at the end of summer, the whoosh of it rushing in his ears and crashing over his head and tripping him up so that he can’t tell which way is sky and which way is salty sea bed and then Zach’s hands are on him again, or maybe they never let go, and his head breaks the surface and he’s laughing as water streams down his face, air coming and going from his lungs in great gusts that shudder through his whole body as Zach just holds on tight. 

The setting sun catches Zach’s eyes, turning their warm amber to flame, and suddenly all Chris can think is how goddamn lucky he is, how lucky he’s always been, even standing here in the freezing Pacific with what he’s pretty sure is seaweed down his shorts. He reaches a hand up to touch Zach’s face, marveling at how easily it moves from worried to relieved. Zach reaches up and catches it with his own.

“Ok?” Zach asks, and Chris nods, his laughter subsiding into a calm joy. A wave rushes them, splashing cold water between their chests, and Chris leans in to press his mouth to Zach’s, opening to the taste of salt. 

 


End file.
